shattered on this embarrassing passage between herself and the French
encyclopædist, she gave up all further attempts to improve on Panin’s
pedagogy. Her opinion of the lazy Count as an educator was not high
but it was probably as high as he deserved. Nevertheless she left him
in possession of the field. “At that time,” she commented, “everybody
believed that if Panin did not educate him, the Grand Duke would be
lost.” Panin remained in exclusive charge as governor until Paul’s
marriage took place. He continued his watchfulness even after that from
his post as head of the College of Foreign Affairs until Prince Orlov
died in 1783. For twenty years, Panin’s chief interest in life had been
to watch and circumvent this man whom he regarded as the dangerous
enemy of his Grand Duke. Panin had failed to save the Czar when he
had piteously kissed his hand and pleaded and he could never forgive
himself for that failure. He felt to blame for Peter’s death and was
therefore obliged to hate, suspect, and persecute Gregory Orlov. After
Orlov’s death he no longer had an incentive to live. The sensitive
old man soon followed his arch-enemy into the grave. The Empress was
bereaved at the same time of two of her oldest and nearest friends.
2
Compelled to leave Paul’s education alone, she waited impatiently for
the time to marry him. She resolved to be less hasty than the Empress
Elisabeth, who had married her nephew at sixteen against the doctor’s
advice. Catherine waited until her son had reached the age of eighteen
before she sought a wife for him. Relations between the mother and son
improved considerably during Paul’s eighteenth summer. They spent the
warm season together in Czarskoe Selo and the Empress for the first
time made a companion of her son. A new sympathy grew up between them;
the long estrangement seemed to be over at last. It is easy to account
for Catherine’s new interest in Paul. Presumably she had been told that
it would be safe to go ahead and marry him. The young man found himself
taken to his mother’s bosom with unexpected warmth. Those who looked on
thought this was the beginning of a friendliness at last between the
mother and son, but the happy condition was not destined to last long.
For once their interests coincided. Paul wanted a wife and his mother
wanted him to marry. In all other situations of life which preceded and
followed this halcyon interlude the two were ever in conflict.
The Empress surveyed with a critical eye the German supply of
Princesses. Some not too powerful Prince’s daughter after her own image
was the object of her search. At last she selected a mother with three
daughters and invited all three sisters to Russia that the Grand Duke
might choose among them. In the old days when the Russian Czarevich
wished to marry a Russian princess, it was customary for the eligible
damsels to seat themselves in two long rows in the Kremlin palace while
the young heir passed between them, looking to right and left, until
he chose his bride. This ancient custom was in the Empress’s thoughts
when she invited the Landgravine of Hessen-Darmstadt to bring her three
daughters to Petersburg.
Catherine was proud to be able to write to Prince Henry of Prussia,
who had also planned to visit her, that his visit would have to
be postponed because his apartments would be needed for the young
Princesses and their mother. “I may say to you in confidence, with
the indiscretion that is natural to ladies, that these apartments are
destined this summer for Madame the Landgravine of Hessen-Darmstadt.”
If Prince Henry then so far betrayed her confidence as to inform his
royal brother, Frederick the Great, that the Empress of Russia was
about to marry her son and heir, the indiscretion of the Empress would
be justified. That the King of Prussia had no son was a fact she liked
to dwell upon. She was always in one way or another the rival of the
Prussian monarch and in becoming a parent she had outstripped him.
Paul was about to continue the Romanov dynasty as his mother had done
before him, while the childless old King of Potsdam, aging in solitude,
could point to no such happy line of succession. Like the late Russian
Empress, he was obliged to make the best of a nephew as an heir.
The Landgravine of Hessen-Darmstadt came to Petersburg with her
three daughters and went away again with two of them. The betrothal
and marriage were rather hasty and not particularly gay. The new
Grand Duchess, re-baptized as Natalie Alexeievna, was not a vivid
personality and her short life in Russia left no legends. It was an
unhappy marriage from the beginning and lasted but three years, at the
end of which Natalie died in childbirth. Just what happened to the
young wife during these years is a story that no one has told. Paul’s
complaints of Natalie show that he must have behaved very badly toward
her. While this marriage lasted, his disposition took on a fixed habit
of depression. Scarcely twenty years old, he succumbed to pessimistic
moods from which he looked to his wife in vain to extract him. As
Natalie had not the gift of lighting up his “papillons noirs,” his
favorite name for them, he settled more and more stubbornly in the
black depths of miserable self-pity. Frequently he wept.
No doubt his mother had her moments of anxiety because the marriage did
not produce a grandchild at once. In the third year, however, the Grand
Duchess became pregnant; the hopes of the Empress were at last to be
realized. Catherine made preparations for the lying-in to take place
in Petersburg, where Czars might be born although they might not be
crowned. In the springtime of 1776, she expected the son of her son.
The fatal outcome of Natalie’s lying-in was described by the Empress in
one of her most characteristic letters. The swiftness and vividness of
her narrative reflect the sure movement of her spirit. In this letter
we see her moving through a crisis as she moved through every crisis of
a life that was so extraordinarily rich in danger and risks. It mirrors
that acceptance of facts which enabled her to pass through murder at
Peterhof and to emerge almost unscathed by comparison with temperaments
like Orlov and Panin. In Catherine’s make-up was some of that tough
fibre which enabled Alexei, the head of the Orlov clan, to profit by
his crimes while others far less guilty than himself did morbid penance
on his behalf.
“On the 10th of April,” wrote Catherine to Grimm, “at four o’clock in
the morning, my son came to find me because his wife perceived the
pains of confinement. I leaped out of bed and ran to her. I found her
much tormented but nothing beyond the ordinary. Time and patience would
end the affair. A mid-wife and a skilful surgeon aided her.... Monday
passed in waiting and in a similar condition, very disturbing....
The doctors’ conference produced no new expedients or assuagement.
On Tuesday they demanded my physician and an old _accoucheur_ to
renew their consultation.... They decided to save the mother, as the
infant was probably dead; instruments were employed; a combination
of unfortunate circumstances, occasioned by malformation and divers
accidents, made all that human science could do on Wednesday useless.
On Thursday the Grand Duchess received the sacrament. Prince Henry
suggested his physician; he was admitted but he agreed with his
confrères. On Thursday the Princess gave up the ghost at five o’clock
in the evening. Today she has been cut open in the presence of thirteen
physicians and surgeons who found that it was a unique and irremediable
case....
“Twenty-four hours before the death of the Grand Duchess, I sent to ask
Prince Henry, for my own relief, to take charge of the Grand Duke. He
came and has not left him since. He endures his profound chagrin with
composure but today he has taken a fever. Since the death of his wife,
I have picked him up and brought him here [Czarskoe Selo].
“Imagine me, who am tearful by temperament; I have seen someone die
without shedding a tear. I said to myself: If you cry, the others will
sob; if you sob, the others will swoon; and everybody will lose their
heads and be at their wits’ end; all of which will be irresponsible....”
While the widowed Grand Duke still lay in ruins, his mother set about
finding a new wife for him. She has been reproached for her unseemly
haste in the matter. Brückner says critically that even while Natalie
was dying, the Empress’s thoughts were occupied with a second marriage
for her son. Of this there is not the least doubt. Three years of
marriage had ended in a still-birth; much time had been lost already
and the business-like Empress saw no reason for losing any more. She
had maternal and imperial interests at stake, and match-making was a
chore like any other, something to be done with as little delay as
possible. It was apparent that the Grand Duke, who had gone to pieces
in the crisis and who developed a fever afterwards, was unable to do
anything on his own behalf. He had no more initiative to bring to the
making of a second marriage than he had brought to the first. He would
have to be inducted into matrimony once again.
Catherine took counsel with Prince Henry of Prussia, who happened
to be in Petersburg at this dismal time. The death of Natalie made
it impossible for the Empress to entertain her guest with the
same elaborate festivities with which his former sojourn had been
celebrated. Prince Henry protested that he was not at all bored, which
the apologetic hostess refused to believe. But the melancholy and
oppressed younger brother of Frederick the Great was more at home in
the midst of tragedy and misfortune than in the gaiety and abandon of
a Russian masquerade. In a court that mourned for the dead Natalie,
he was at ease. He had a contribution to make. A second wife for Paul
was to be brought from Germany and the Prince was asked to arrange the
match. It seems that he approved of the Empress’s choice.
One reason that Catherine was already occupied with the thought of
marrying her son while his wife lay dying was that she had long
wished she had chosen another Princess instead. Three years before,
when making her first survey of the field, she had considered the
Princess Sophie von Württemberg and had passed her over because she
was too young. Time had remedied this difficulty but had substituted
another. Sophie had recently become engaged and was shortly to be
married to the hereditary Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt. This young man
was well known in Russia and disliked by the Empress. He was a brother
of Paul’s first wife and had come to Russia to make his career there
in Catherine’s army. But after a couple of years she sent him home
to his father. “God help him,” she wrote; “he is better off there
than in Moscow.” This annoying young man had then engaged himself to
Sophie of Württemberg and the betrothal presented a serious obstacle to
Catherine’s plans. There was nothing for the Empress to do but to buy
him off. Apparently he was able to drive a pretty sharp bargain for he
received, as a compensation for his disappointment, a pension for life.
“On condition,” the Empress wrote peevishly, “that I shall never see or
hear from him again.”
This delicate matter was arranged through the agency of Prince Henry,
on whom Catherine at this time leaned heavily. She trusted all the
details to the solemn silent Prussian. She even consented that her
son should leave home under Henry’s tutelage to court his bride in a
foreign land. So far as the Grand Duke was concerned, the opportunity
to visit Prussia gave him the greatest thrill of his courtship and
furnished a strong incentive to marriage. He was already in love with
Prussia and the Prussian King in imitation of the ex-Czar, Peter III.
Accompanied by Prince Henry, he was allowed to make a pilgrimage to
the land of his ideals and to sue in person for the hand of his bride.
Whatever Sophie’s feelings may have been when she first saw this ugly
little man, she dutifully accepted him and made no fuss about it. The
Princess was a tall blonde girl, in stature not unlike the late Empress
Elisabeth, but German and _spiessbürgerlich_ to her finger-tips. She
was and remained all her days an incurable Philistine.
As soon as Paul returned from Germany, the Empress began to expedite
the marriage. “The Princess is yet to come,” she wrote to Grimm, “and
we shall have her here within ten days. As soon as we have her, we
shall proceed with her conversion. To convince her, it ought to take
about fifteen days I think. I do not know how long will be necessary to
teach her to read intelligibly and correctly the confession of faith
in Russian. But the faster this can be hurried through, the better
it will be. To accelerate all that, M. Pastukov has gone to Memel to
teach her the alphabet and the confession en route; conviction will
follow afterwards. You see by this we are foresighted and cautious and
this conversion and confession of faith travels by post. Eight days
from this act, I fix the wedding. If you wish to dance at it, you will
have to hasten.” The tall Princess Sophie was converted according to
Catherine’s schedule and became the Grand Duchess Marie Feodorovna.
Within five months after the death of his first wife, Paul was married
again. His second wife was a healthy, phlegmatic woman. He was almost
happy. “Wherever _my wife_ goes,” he wrote to Prince Henry, “she has
the gift of spreading gaiety and ease, and she has the art not only of
dissipating my black moods but of giving me back again the disposition
I had almost lost during the last three unhappy years.”
Paul’s second marriage was probably the best marriage that could
possibly have been made for him. The fair tall wife called up pleasant
memories of the devoted nurse who had run to the fox-fur cradle
every time the baby in it cried. Marie Feodorovna was complacent and
domestic; she loved her flower garden and she loved the proprieties.
Paul lived many pious uneventful years with her and the Philistine pair
often sat in judgment on the life of the Empress. Nowhere in Europe was
the light woman on the Russian throne so severely condemned as she was
by her son and his virtuous wife. Marie Feodorovna was like the heroine
of a Gartenlaube story and a long and stormy life in Russia never
succeeded in making her anything else. She was a sentimental German to
the last.
Catherine gave them the village of Pavlovsk for a residence. Here
Paul built a little palace and Marie laid out her flower garden.
After the death of Prince Orlov, Catherine purchased Gatchina for
them. It was a place of evil memories for Paul, the scene of Orlov’s
final insanity and death. The ghost of Peter the Third had walked
there and had carried off to judgment the guilty soul of Gregory
Orlov. These uncanny memories meant nothing to the Empress but they
had an unhealthy influence on her son. He shut himself up in Gatchina
away from all the world and expressed himself in the development of
the place. To this day it reflects his personality as Czarskoe Selo
reflects the personality of his mother. In Gatchina he played with his
military passions and his mysticism. He tried to make himself as much
as possible like Peter III, whose ghost walked with him through the
endless corridors.
3
Catherine was forty-eight when her first grandson was born. She called
him Alexander, as she said, a “pompous name.” In 1777, her ambitious
imagination ranged over the southern part of her dominions wherever
Alexander the Great had passed and where he first met the Scythians.
Catherine was just then entering upon her great dream of empire, the
dream which dominated the rest of her life. She needed children and
children’s children to carry on the vast work she had planned. The
dutiful Marie responded by producing two sons within a short space of
time. Alexander was followed by Constantine, for the Empress loved
resounding names. Catherine’s joy in these infants was unbounded. She
had borne five children but had never nursed one of them. At last her
time had come. She took possession of the little new-born creatures and
sent the mother back to Pavlovsk, childless. She re-enacted to the last
detail the crime of Empress Elisabeth against herself.
In a lyrical letter to Grimm, she announced the birth of her first
grandson. But when she spoke of Alexander’s future her rapturous tone
fell to a pensive strain. “Aber, mein Gott, was wird aus dem Jungen
werden?” She fell back as she rarely did into her native German. “I
console myself with Boyle and the father of Tristram Shandy, who was
of the opinion that a name is an influence that matters.... Do you
think his examples from the family prove anything? His choice of them
embarrasses sometimes. His examples only show, to speak the gospel
according to the venerable Pastor Wagner, that it is the _naturel_
which counts. But where to find that! Is it at the bottom of the pack
of a good constitution?... It is a pity that fairies have gone out of
fashion; they would give an infant all that one wished. I should have
made them beautiful presents and I should have whispered in their ears:
Mesdames, _naturel_, just a little bit of _naturel_ and experience will
then do all the rest.”
The interests of a grandmother did not distract her attention from
the events of the fast spinning world. As its happenings sped past,
like a flying factory belt, she invariably registered the passage of
episodes which concerned her. Even the christening of Alexander did not
obscure the defeat of General Burgoyne in America. “Monsieur Alexander
was baptized the day before yesterday,” she wrote, “and everyone is
doing well, except the English, who hang their heads to their stomachs
since the deplorable adventure of General Burgoyne. He should gnaw his
fingers after the fashion of Prince Potiomkin; that sets the blood in
circulation. If that of the Parliament of Great Britain remains calm
now I call them plodding nags....” She was scornful of George III who
was evidently going to allow the American colonies to slip through his
fingers. His grandchildren might lose America at the same time that her
own might enter Constantinople. That is, they would if _naturel_ led
them in that direction. Her magnificent dreams for Alexander alternated
with an uncertain mood which usually brought on an attack of the German
language. “Aber, mein Gott, was wird aus dem Jungen werden?”
Having appropriated her two grandsons in this unceremonious fashion,
Catherine’s cupidity seemed for the time satisfied. Marie Feodorovna
came up to the Petersburg palace at regular intervals and bore her
children there. It turned out that granddaughters were not wanted in
Catherine’s nursery and the young mother was allowed to take her girl
babies back to Pavlovsk and educate them herself. Catherine thought the
little Princesses beautiful and charming but she was content to give
them lovely Greek names and send them home with Mama. Alexander and
Constantine, however, were ardently studied, ardently educated and
ardently sewed for.
The Empress designed a garment for Alexander of which she was extremely
proud. She boasted that the King of Sweden and the Prince of Prussia
had heard of it and had borrowed the pattern for their own little boys.
The picture which she drew and sent abroad vindicated her boast of
its simplicity. “Nowhere,” she explains, “is there any ligature, and
the child scarcely knows that he is being dressed. The arms and legs
go into the garment at the same time and lo! all is finished. It is
a stroke of genius on my part, this habit.” Her letters were filled
with the sayings and doings of her darling. She gave a catalogue of
his achievements at the age of four. He could write, spell, draw,
use a spade, shoulder arms, and mount a horse; he could make twenty
playthings out of one and ask endless questions. The other day he had
asked whether there were human beings in the moon and whether he had
been born in the moon or on the earth. “I do not know,” said Grandmamma
fervently, “but there is a kind of profundity which springs up in the
head of this little monkey.”
In the shadow of this wonderful brother, Constantine was obliged to
make such headway as he could. There was less than eighteen months’
difference in age between the two boys and in many respects they
were treated like twins. They had two low chairs exactly alike in
Grandmamma’s boudoir and the model garment of her invention was always
made up in pairs. In their education, however, certain distinctions
were observed. Alexander, the future Czar, was brought up on the
English plan as far as possible. This, to the Empress, meant fresh air
and liberal ideals and she saw to it that Alexander was nourished on
these things from his earliest infancy. Constantine showed from the
beginning a strong repugnance to fresh air. The unregenerate infant
annoyed his grandmother greatly by “burying his nose in the linen and
shutting out the air.” She gave him a Greek nurse and surrounded him
with Greek attendants in order that he should begin life speaking this
language only. Constantine was brought up to be King of Greece, where a
salubrious climate would enable him to hold his head up and breathe the
fresh air like a man. This younger brother of Alexander was destined
never to be King of Greece or King of anything, least of all himself.
The intensity of his secondary part deprived him of all aggressiveness
in infancy, saddled him with an irascible temper, and cast him for an
utterly passive rôle in life.
Alexander idolized his grandmother while Constantine hated her. “Do you
know,” Constantine said to the Swedish Prince when he met him in the
palace of his grandmother, “that you are in the house of the greatest
whore in Europe?”
Catherine had been obliged by circumstances to refrain from interfering
in the education of her own son. Her attempt to import D’Alembert from
France had failed and she had allowed matters to proceed as they had
started under the guidance of Panin. But she was not satisfied with the
results and hoped to do much better for her two grandsons. She wrote
an extensive Instruction for the guidance of their teachers, producing
this time a far more original piece of work than her famous message to
the commission on a code of laws. It contained common sense and insight
only occasionally darkened by the author’s well-known prejudices. She
counselled those in charge of young children to avoid scolding them
and to cultivate a gentle attitude in order that they should learn not
to fear people. The spirit of Babet Cardel, the spirit of common sense,
expressed itself repeatedly in Catherine’s pedagogy. Her prejudice
appeared in a flat prohibition against the arts for which she herself
had no understanding. “The Grand Dukes are to be taught neither poetry
or music; because it would occupy too much of their time to attain
excellence in either....”
Whatever latent talent the two boys may have had in the creative arts
was never encouraged to express itself. Grandmother’s repressions were
too strong. Alexander might have learned to sing like a bird if he had
had another Babet Cardel to teach him and if his devoted but jealous
grandmother had not cut him off from every opportunity to learn. She
succeeded in transmitting her own tone-deafness to him in an aggravated
form.
Alexander was as his name indicated destined for a military career;
Catherine pictured him as the conqueror of Constantinople at least.
But she loathed the idea of what she called Prussian corporalism. The
imitation battles of Peter the Third and her son Paul, their drilling
and dragooning, their manœuvring and parading struck her as unwarlike.
She preferred the looser methods of her Russian generals, Suvarov,
Rumiantsov, Potiomkin. Her grandson was to be a conqueror of the
Russian school. In any case, however, he must operate with big guns
and tolerate the noise they made. A worry had grown up in her mind
around this matter of big guns. General Potiomkin, leader of her forces
against the Turks, had a terrible handicap. When the sound of firing
came to him in his encampment behind the lines, he trembled in his
Russian boots. The Empress knew this well; indeed far too many people
knew it well and the idiosyncrasy ill became the chief of the Russian
army. If Potiomkin failed to take Constantinople, it would probably
be due to this mysterious weakness of his. Mysterious it was, for
Potiomkin was really no coward.